Strategy for watching airfare price

I think Tripadvisor has a function that notifies you via e mail about significant developments in airfares between two cities.

Sign up for price alerts from Kayak and the airlines that fly to where you are going. Decide on a price you can live with then buy your tickets and don't look at ticket prices again.

Be sure to check out Clark Howard's website under Today's Travel Deals. He has one from Chattanooga to London now for $853. It's for March though but one for May could pop up soon. The downside is most of the sale flights his team finds are in a 2-3 month window. I get his travel letter and have found several great deals from it. Most sales listed are from Atlanta, but like you are discovering, it's sometimes cheaper to add the Chattanooga leg. Good luck! Another note: I bought tickets about a year ago for only about $75 less and that was for Christmas so it was probably as popular as May is so I wouldn't expect any wild swings in price, but you may get lucky.

You can sign up for messages from Travelocity, etc., they'll email you with fare changes for your trip. As you say in your post, your time is worth something, too. As another poster said, when you find a fare you can live with, scoop it up and stop looking.

Kayak fare alert. http://www.kayak.com/email

I agree that looking for air fares can be frustrating and time consuming. You're right that flying out of Chattanooga is cheaper, even though you'll be connecting to your international flight on Delta out of more expensive Atlanta. The cheaper fares are changing this year on March 20th, as Easter is earlier on March 31st. Your above fare appears fair for May, 2013, and budget air fares are not really expected this year. Like was said, sign up to be notified of changes on some of the big national booking companies. Air fares should be shake out in March for May flights. You could also listen to the travel segments on ClarkHoward.com from 1:00-3:00 P.M., or he can be heard on AM750 WMC Radio that can be picked up in Chattanooga. Clark's staff has saved Atlanta air travelers hundreds of millions $ in the last 20 years I've been listening to him.

Thanks, everyone for your help. I especially appreciate the encouragement to go ahead and pull the trigger when I get to an acceptable price. I've decided to check the Delta website once a day, at most, and the Matrix Airfare Search. I love the Matrix chart because we could stay anywhere from 23 - 28 days and be happy, and it shows varying prices for each day with date of return. It is clear that prices start hiking up pretty high on May 17. I signed up for price change alerts with several websites (all of which I can't remember). Yes, I used to live in Atlanta and heard Clark Howard. His deals seem more spur of the moment. And there's no guarantee that there will be a good deal to GB in May.

This is my strategy, I go to orbitz.com and set up my dates and destination and then do a search.. Then every day when you go back (and go back every day) it will have saved your recent searches. Whole process takes about 2-3 minutes. You need to check every day as the flight I ed dropped in price from $1000 to $800 wbut only stayed that low for a couple of days.
Then your can go directly to the airline website and book your flight.